"Angie Estes' stunning new collection of poems is a brilliant and intellectually dazzling investigation of the often unstable relationship between language and experience. These heart-breaking and inventive poems negotiate the oscillations of event and memory in order to reveal the delicate and highly filigreed interweaving--in our lives--of action, meditation, and utterance. Beauty and insight spill off every page of this rich, compelling, and essential new book of poetry." —David St. John

From the Book:

More

arch than sky, more vault
than heaven, roof
of the mouth, more tent
than motet covering the space between
notes. Hautbois, hautboy,
high wood, oh boy—is that the tune
the oboe hums? Above
the nave, triforium, clerestory,
vault, every arch points
to what? Architecture
is the building
of interior space: a cathedral, a glove
for the hand of God, gladiolus,
foxglove ascending as if
there’s no end. What then? Music
is what is left of lustre, heading
west: the shape of what’s spread
between the ceiling’s ribs, vaulted beaks
of how many birds in the nest
asking for

ANGIE ESTES is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Tryst (Oberlin College Press, 2009), named one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America.